Pope Francis New Vatican press office director appointed
Pope Francis has appointed Matteo Bruni to serve as director of the Vatican press office, replacing Alessandro Gisotti, who had been serving as interim director since December 31, 2018.
The Vatican announced the appointment last week. Bruni (42), previously served as assistant to the director since 2013, helping organise and coordinate media presence and pools on papal trips.
Born in Winchester, Bruni began working at the Vatican press office in 2009, coordinating accreditation for journalists. In 2016, during the Year of Mercy, he was appointed as coordinator of media operations for the Jubilee Year events.
According to the Vatican, he also helps Church-run projects dealing with “humanitarian cooperation and support programmes for the elderly”.
The Vatican also announced that the Pope appointed Gisotti and Sergio Centofanti, an Italian journalist at Vatican News, as deputy editorial directors of the Dicastery for Communications. Both Gisotti and Centofanti will work with the dicastery’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli.
Amazon Synod to focus on ‘culture of waste’
The objective of the upcoming Synod of Bishops for the Amazon is to highlight the need for religious, political and social leaders to come together and defend the dignity of indigenous men, women and children and an ecosystem that is crucial to the environment, Peruvian Cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno of Huancayo has said.
In an essay published on July 18 by La Civilta Cattolica, the Jesuit journal, Cardinal Barreto said the synod as well as the Church’s mission in the Amazon are “expressions of a significant accompaniment to the daily life of the peoples and communities who live there”.
“According to the social doctrine of the Church, the mission of every Christian includes a prophetic commitment to justice, peace, the dignity of every human being without distinction, and to the integrity of creation in response to a predominant model of society that leads to exclusion and inequality and causes what Pope Francis has called a real ‘culture of waste’ and a ‘globalisation of indifference’,” the cardinal said.
The synod gathering in October will reflect on the theme ‘Amazonia: New paths for the Church and for an integral ecology’.
Vatican City to stop selling single-use plastic
After current supplies run out, Vatican City State will no longer be selling any single-use plastic items on its tiny territory.
While the European Union pledged in May to ban single-use plastic starting in 2021, the Vatican had already begun limiting its use and soon “it will no longer be sold”, said Rafael Ignacio Tornini, head of the department handling Vatican City State’s gardens and waste collection.
“We have been making an effort to sort as much (plastic) as possible, and the state has limited all sales of single-use plastic,” he told the Italian news agency ANSA last week.
After all previously stocked items are gone, no more single-use plastic will be sold, he said.
Single-use plastic include bags, water bottles, cutlery, straws and balloons. The top five single-use plastic items polluting European shores are cigarette butts, bottles and caps, food packaging, cotton swab sticks and wet wipes, according to research in 2016 by the European Commission.
The Vatican has long been working to get green, most notably with the installation of a solar power system on the roof of the Paul VI audience hall.